ScuzzBlog: Diaries September 2021
Entry 12th September 2021: Post 1: Duke Nukem - The end of Amiga gaming.
Duke Nukem - The end of Amiga gaming.
The date was 1996 and I was still heavily entrenched in my Amiga
addiction. Each day I would venture into Game in the town and
check out the latest gaming titles. Things had slowed down a lot
and games were getting few and far between. I recall the day they
moved the Amiga area into the basement and had a sale on Quickshot
joysticks. Turned out that this was the last of their stock.
I guess what made 1996 worse was the anticipated games turned out
to be anything but stimulating. Games like Robinson's Requiem had
been long in the making and turned out to be very poor. Sensible
appeared to be losing interest. Sensible Golf bombed, they couldn't
even get the cover disk to work properly.
The last real game I played on the Amiga was TopGear 2 which in
truth was a title better suited to the C64. I also played KingPin
which albeit a little different from the norm, failed generally to
stimulate for any length of time. And Speris was seriously bad.
The problem was simple. Games developers were moving onto other
platforms that were more active and better able to handle the large
amount of data games needed. The CD was dominant and the Amiga user
was not necessarily able to utilise CD based games, or the memory.
When I saw just how Civilization looked on the PC I knew the days
of gaming on the Amiga were up.
In July 1996 I purchased my first Windows based machine and was
soon spending every waking hour playing Civilization. I just loved
the video interludes of the various bosses. The whole thing just
screamed freedom and no more restrictive disk based game play. By
the time I found Duke Nukem I was no longer considering the Amiga
as a games machine. The games titles for the PC seemed endless and
better still there was more than enough choice of joysticks.
The Quickshot I feature here, although very mellow yellow now still
has a magical feel to it and after such poor quality on the Amiga
just was a real breath of fresh air. It allowed me to enjoy the
game without the eternal restrictive feel of the way cruder Amiga
alternatives were. Duke Nukem was also a classic game that was fast
furious and exhausting. I played till my fingers went numb. It never
disappointed. In truth Duke Nukem killed the Amiga for me as a
gaming platform. Once I had been exposed to the depth of game the
PC could offer, and without and disk swapping, man was it a relief.
Interestingly the PC gaming era did not last very long at all. The
problem with 1996-97 was that a lot of PC games were still DOS
based. This meant that after installing the game you needed to
install the sound and graphics plus controller separately in DOS.
This came to a head following release of Tomb Raider on 25th
October 1996 when I was unable to successfully configure the PC
to run the game. I really wanted to play Tomb Raider and so I
purchased a PlayStation and the rest is history. In a very short
time I had taken the leap from Speris Legacy to Tomb Raider and
when you compare the two you will realise that there was never
ever any coming back.
And so Amiga games like Worms were placed high on dusty shelves
and the poor Amiga never again was used as a gaming platform.
Tomb Raider lead me to Final Fantasy and Resident Evil and to
Command and Conquer and on and on and on. I only returned to the
PC in 2008 to play World of Warcraft which I still play to this
day. I am not a retro gamer so I will only review Amiga games out
of historical interest. Games are about today and not yesterday
and no matter what anyone tells you when you move to a next gen
game you will never go back. Why would you ?
Duke Nukem - The end of Amiga gaming.
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